It’s Official! You Suck! THE COLLECTION and the Logistics of Union Carpentry

I come from a family of carpenters, and though I’m not one myself, I’ve been on enough job sites with my dad and brother when I was in my 20s to understand just how dumb a flick THE COLLECTION is.

About seven minutes in, the main gal and two of her idiot friends head into an underground rave. The location is huge, likely a warehouse, with a high ceiling. Don’t worry about what any of the characters are doing. I want to focus on what the Collector is about to do, and how he’d never be able to pull this off as a one-man killing machine.

Tricking the main gal into opening a trunk in a ladies’ room, the Collector gets her to set off a wire that runs across a series of pulleys, around angles, up the insides of walls, and finally trips a lever toward that high ceiling. This shuts and locks all the steel doors to the club, and engages a steam engine that sets in motion a combine full of rotating teeth, much like on a hay baler. Said teeth then start to swing down and toward the front of the club, shredding every human in their way, including the DJ, wiping out all her audio equipment. A girl running to escape then trips a wire in a hallway, which sends a blade out of the wall, cutting her down. The remaining survivors flee, only to have a gate close behind them and another in front. The Collector then pushes a lever to send the grated ceiling above downward onto the survivors, crushing them into blood pulp.

That’s a lot of carnage. It’s also the most ridiculous scene I’ve ever seen in a horror flick. And likely the dumbest.

He only had to hit one lever. Sure why not.

When Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan were coming up with what I’m sure they considered “so cool,” did they even stop for a second to think about logistics? Apparently not, but I did. The Collector is one guy, so there’s no way he could have put all this machinery in place himself. To hoist up those rotating teeth, he’d need at least two men, and maybe four. Even if he had construction lifts and the like, he’d never be able to balance those rows himself, and then attach them to the machinery that’s spinning them. All those pulleys through the walls and up to the ceiling would’ve involved ripping down walls to install, or building walls over them. Putting a steam engine in place to drive the machinery would require him not only to do all that carpentry, but also to be a steam mechanic. There’s no way he could pull all this off by himself.

If he can’t do it solo, then he’s got to hire a team of skilled union laborers to do the work for him. He’d need a general contractor to get all the trades in place, several companies would then bid on each job, and they’d work off blueprints. Given all this, the first guy who saw the blueprints would likely question what the Hell rotating teeth are doing on a ceiling mount, and he’d have to ask a guy behind a black mask, lest the Collector give up his identity. Maybe the Collector could buy off a few people, and bring in unskilled laborers more concerned about staying in the country as illegals than the purpose of the death machine they’re installing. But that would be a lot of cash to pour out, so the Collector had better have collected a boatload of it for several years. And speaking of cash, there’s the cost of machinery and labor, plus several months of planning, coordinating and the installation itself. All on the chance that the Collector’s next chosen victim will come to that club on that given night and have to use the ladies’ room with the trunk inside.

None of these legions of bodies gunked up the machinery

This is the dumbest load of crap I’ve seen in a horror flick. It’s absolutely mind numbing just how dumb this is. It goes so far past ridiculous that nothing in the rest of the movie that follows has any credibility. Which is why I only have to dump on the first 15 minutes of this flick to recommend you never watch this garbage, unless you want to be insulted by writers who thought they were being so cool they never stopped to think about how dumb this whole setup is.

I never went into carpentry because it’s not for me. My dad, brother and other family members went into the trades, and I only did it for a few summers so I could make some cash. But I’d like to think the real reason I worked in the field was so I could say, Hey COLLECTION, It’s Official! You Suck!